Daniel’s practice centres on oil painting, with a technical focus on glazing grounded in portraiture and figurative work. His paintings explore themes of family bonds, generational resemblance and death examining how bodies, memories and moments connect individuals across time.

By combining figures from different ages and generations within a single composition the work operates in two ways. Firstly, it encourages reflection on physical resemblance and ageing by presenting bodies that mirror features across different stages of life, highlighting how these features change over time, inviting viewers to consider their own position within this process and their proximity to death.

Secondly, the work reflects a mobility after you have passed. By presenting the deceased alongside the living through these shared stages, moments and memories, the paintings suggest these past generations are not lost but persist within the present and reflected in the living today. In this way, death is not an end but a change where what is lost lives on within us.

Daniel’s process begins with the concept of the punctum introduced by Roland Barthes to describe a specific detail in a photograph that “pierces” its viewer, eliciting an intense emotional response. Guided by this idea, he filters through archived photographs to find this response.

These images are then digitally manipulated via layering, fragmenting and distorting to construct visuals of these combined individuals as the artist understands them. The final compositions are translated into oil paintings using glazing techniques to create soft and seamless transitions across the surface of the skin.

Instagram: @danielbrocklesbysart